Many people like to have their configuration metadata available in a data file, rather than a Python program. This is easy to do with Paver:
from paver.easy import *
@task
def auto():
    config_data = (read config data using config parser of choice)
    # assuming config_data is a dictionary
    options.update(config_data)
The auto task is automatically run when the pavement is launched. You can use Python’s standard ConfigParser module, if you’d like to store the information in an .ini file.